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An excerpt from Yesterday's Sky Chapter 5
THE ASTRONOMY OF THE LUNAR NODES
If you are a nerd, welcome to paradise. If you slept through science, but were wide-eyed when English class turned to the Romantic poets, you will probably make a very fine astrologer—but you might want to skip this chapter.
So, what exactly are the nodes of the Moon? Obviously, they are not planets. Since they are the foundation of Evolutionary Astrology and the gateway into karmic analysis, let’s take a little while to understand them rigorously.
Earth orbits the Sun, but since we are sitting on the Earth, it doesn’t look that way. For millennia, our ancestors assumed it was the other way around—that the Sun orbited the Earth. Since astrology is Earth-centered, we stick with that visual illusion in our language and perspective. What we actually see is that the Sun circuits the same band of constellations each year. Astrologers call that band the Zodiac. Astronomers call it the Ecliptic.
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for Serena Williams Sep. 26, 1981, 8:28:00 PM EDT +04:00, Saginaw, MI 083W57’03” 43N25’10” (note: our source for her birth data is AstroDataBank, Rodden data classification A) Planets within 1.5 degree orbs of the following house cusp are displayed and interpreted as being in that house, except the Ascendant which uses 3 degrees. Orb Conjunctions …
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Steven Forrest discusses the future of astrology in this keynote address recorded at the NORWAC astrology conference in May 2007.
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The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's painting, 'The Sun' (left) shows a huge, radiant solar disc rising over a fjord, where a diminutive house clings to a rocky cliff overlooking the water. Munch's sun emits kaleidoscopically multicolored rays of pulsing, almost animate, light, all streaming out from that immense central core, illuminating and virtually setting fire to the landscape below. The original hangs in the Festival Hall at the University of Oslo. A print hangs in my office and often stops first time clients in their tracks.
An Interview with Steven Forrest and Jeffrey Wolf Green
by Hadley Fitzgerald, M.A., M.F.T.This article first appeared in The Mountain Astrologer (TMA), and is reprinted by permission. For Ms. Fitzgerald's bio and contact information, please scroll to the end of the article. For Steven and Jeffrey's definition of Evolutionary Astrology, please scroll to the end of the article, or go to our About Evolutionary Astrology page.
In ancient times, as cultures appropriated one another's deities, the Romans latched onto a god named Pluto as their correlative to the Greek god Hades, lord of the underworld. This god's realm gradually became synonymous with "hell" down through the ages in repetitive cross-cultural mistranslations. We've forgotten that the Greeks commonly referred to Hades by his more popular epithet, "Pluton," the name used in the mysteries to designate the wealth-giver.
"Pluton" is a direct lift from the Greek word "ploutos," which means "riches, wealth, fortune." As in treasure. And it is in the nature of treasure that we do not reach up for it. We must dig down deeply into the netherworlds of our lives and psyches to find the wealth buried there alongside the dark and creepy-crawly things.
Steve Forrest quips that he and Jeff Green have become known in certain circles as "The Pluto Brothers," that the theme from Shaft can be heard in the background when they step onto a stage these days. Both of them have Scorpio rising and Pluto in the 9th house, and everything about their astrological work digs deep and aims high. They re-mind us that the descent into the redemptive darkness is an essential, grounding counterpoint to the New Age "flight into light" that I see at times in my clinical practice. Steven and Jeffrey are treasures, and we are richer for the work they are doing on this Earth.
